Mary Tarango

In creating my collagraph prints, I utilize experiences available to me with a diverse array of materials and techniques to create a visual feast. I draw inspiration from the beauty of the Pacific, the rolling vineyards of France, the patches of tulip farms in Holland, from the intensity and colors of India, and the urban and suburban landscapes of California. These impressions are combined on my inked plates with handmade papers collected from Japan, France, India, Nepal and Thailand. I cut, scratch, adhere, mold and manipulate materials onto my plates without conventional limitations. By producing prints using everyday mundane materials, I am placing my work in an entirely new context, with the goal of challenging and changing the viewer’s perceptions. In an age of extremes, wealth and poverty, peace and discord, technology and ecology, my art strives for a universal landscape of harmony, blending cultural decorative motifs, color, texture and pattern.

I work in various media with a particular focus on printmaking and investigate mixing materials, the use of multiples, and drawing. I love the intended marks and layers of color and textures inherent in printmaking. Like the natural structures I use as subject matter, printmaking has a method and stages that are not always recognizable to the untrained eye. For me, the process has to build on itself to create the final image.Teaching is also very important to me, and I have been involved in arts education and public programming for 15 years. I have taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Fullerton Museum Center in Orange County, and the City of Los Angeles, Department of Recreation and Parks. I am currently the Senior Curator of Public Engagement at the Craft &amp; Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles.

The metal plate retains a trace of every successive stage of etching and carving, recording a process of spontaneous change and development.And new and unexpected images are born out of the process of exploring various printmaking methods.I explore symbols of hope surviving in the face of nature’s disasters and human destructiveness. I have recently experimented with abstractions of thoughts and images taken from daily life.